Nelson Algren - A Walk on the Wild Side

‘God has been generous,’ she replied, and let her breasts rise with her pride. Yet let him tickle her palm when he took his change, flashed him her wide white smile and palmed two bits for her trouble.

The little restaurant drew drivers because it was the end of a long narrow road. There was always some cross-country monstrosity backing and turning between gas-pump and mesquite.

The only thing in pants around the place who pleased her was the browless, raggedy boy with the streaky red hair who had come in one day with a sheet of Sunday funnies in his hand – ‘I don’t know how letters make words,’ he told her, ‘so I’d appreciate it mightily if you’d quote these to me, M’am.’

At first she had not understood why he had come to her, of all people. Then she had realized he was ashamed to ask anyone else. So she had gone over the pictures with him section by section until she had gotten stuck on a word herself. That was when she had brought out one of her two books – How To Write Better Business Letters . But before they could make any progress with that a driver with a flat tire pulled up and the raggedy boy was gone to beg.

Sometimes she saw him circling a trailer in an anxious dog trot, one shoulder higher than the other and a tire wrench in his hand. Other times there would be only two big dirty feet sticking out from under a truck, the toes spread tensely lest the job be unfinished when the driver was ready to haul. What was he always so anxious about?

Or he’d just be leaning against the tin sign – FLATS FIXED – that whirled one minute this way and the next minute that as the wind off the chaparral passed and repassed. Beside it he could stand looking as lonesome as though tires were going out of style, treasuring each drag on his roll-your-own cigarette.

‘What do I owe you, Red?’ she heard a trucker asking and the redhead replying, ‘Makin’s ’n cawfee do jest fine for me, mister.’ She knew by his voice then he needed more than tobacco and coffee. ‘Hungry all the way down,’ Terasina guessed.

Apparently he thought money was going out of style too. Coffee and a sack of Bull Durham was his rate for an hour’s sweating labor in the sun. It angered Terasina, who could tell a ten-dollar bill from a Mexican nickel either side of the river, to see older men take advantage of him.

At last she had told a driver herself. ‘Changing two tires and a battery, six bitses please.’

‘The kid said coffee and a sack.’

‘Changing two tires and battery six bitses please. I set price at La Fe .’

The driver put six bitses down. Terasina didn’t touch it. ‘ And tip for boy please.’

The driver extracted a final dime and left without a word. The way Dolores Del Rio was feeling today he didn’t feel he could afford it.

‘You take it,’ Dove told her when she put the money beside his cup, ‘for letting me hang around.’

She rang it up promptly – pshtang! ‘Okay! You got it!’

Six bits credit – he had it.

He decided, after due thought, on Sesos lampreados – brains wrapped in egg. She brought the order, fit for a section hand.

All she saw, for a while then, was his big thick ears sticking up like handles. All she heard was the beat, like a tribal drum, of knife and fork against his plate.

‘—’ n cornbread, m’am. I can eat cornbread till the world looks level.’

A minute later: ‘I’ll take a bowl of chili please m’am.’

‘ Segundoes? ’ she asked when the chili was gone.

A single bean lodged in the corner of his lip. ‘ Si, señora .’

And under the browless eyes there burned remembrance of ancestral hungers; again the tribal drum beat fast.

‘You like more?’ she smiled weakly. ‘ Chicharrones maybe?’

‘I got most all I can chamber,’ he admitted at last – ‘but for a slab of that cross-barred pie.’

She fetched the cross-barred pie and coffee. Stooping so far to get his lips to the saucer that his back stood up like a surfacing whale’s, he slurped it up with one magnificent slurp.

As close as she could figure it he now owed her eighty cents. She brought a broom.

He took it and shuffled heavily, right shoulder still higher than the left, to the door. Then, suddenly fired by the hottest chili north of Chihuahua, stormed from the front porch to the rear, behind the counter and up the stairs. He swept her room as if preparing it for holy services, then broomed the steps down in such a cloud that she rushed up with a sprinkling can.

He washed dishes, scrubbed eatingware till it shone and patched a screen in a minute. Then announced some triumph from the kitchen – ‘ Uno! Dos! ’ He was swatting flies with the Police Gazette .

‘Is al right ,’ she sought to calm him, ‘every thing is square.’

Then in the stilly mid-afternoon hush that comes to all old chili parlors they sat together over How To Write Better Business Letters .

‘This is how letters make words,’ she told him. ‘The first letter is “A”’ – she made him push up and cross the A. ‘Alright. Now “B.”’

Thus a child taught a child.

When he had shown improvement in both letters she suddenly wearied of the game and found another – how to trip the little key behind the coin box of the juke so that it would play without a nickel. It came on playing Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland ; for, like herself, it was divided between American and Mexican songs.

The next song was her choice – Cuando sale de la luna and Dove couldn’t get enough of that. She spiked a coke with tequila and asked him how Angloes could drink the sticky stuff without spiking it. His answer was to agree with her by adding another shot. He began to shift, one foot to the other like a happy bear that had never been happy before—

It had been so long since she had herself felt joy, it eased her deeply now to see another’s. He was one of the strange ones all right, and certainly no florist. He smelled of sweat and salt. No day-lily had touched him.

‘I like to see men dance—’ her own voice surprised her, and she changed the record back to the juke’s Mexican side.

Every time the juke cried out ‘ corazon ,’ Terasina hiccupped. The third time it happened she seized Dove’s hand and held it hard across her nostrils and mouth, encouraging him to press. ‘ Empuje ,’ she ordered the Mexican cure for hiccups. With one arm about her shoulders to brace her, he pressed so hard she began to choke and he had to stop.

‘Death is a poor cure for hiccups,’ she informed him.

She preferred dancing to hiccups or death. Her joy was to hear the eager mingling of human voices, with children’s among them, like voices heard on the other side of a wall where strangers are having a birthday party; and never know one listens who never can enter there.

Once she had heard a young father asking forgiveness and seen the young mother make reply simply by giving suck to his only child. That memory tugged at Terasina’s darkly encircled nipples yet, at her own white breasts so aching.

‘In Jesus is my peace,’ she told the mirror in her small room, ‘ en tristes horas de tentacion, en Jesus tengo paz .’ And the mirror looked back as much as to say I think somebody just lied.

And strangely, for one so devout, in dreams sought neither peace nor Jesus. She would find herself back in some Mexican place, the hour midday and all shades drawn. In wan doorways wan dreams of Mexican dogs dreamed on.